Dana Williams

Dana A. Williams is a Professor of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. Prior to serving as Dean, she served as Chair of English at Howard University for nine years. She has served as president of the College Language Association (the oldest and largest professional organization in the US for faculty of color who teach languages and literatures) and was recently elected as 2^nd Vice President of the Modern Languages Association. She also serves as president of the Toni Morrison Society and as a board member of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Center for Black Literature, and the American Society of Learned Societies. In 2016, she was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as a member of the National Humanities Council. In addition to her work at Howard, she has held faculty positions at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge; Northwestern University, Evanston, IL as a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow; and Duke University, as a faculty fellow of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She has published extensively in the field of African American literature and is currently completing a book on Toni Morrison’s editorship at Random House Publishing Company.